Morbid curiosity

Is there any good reason to report people's suffering and distress? Or images of horror? And do we have an innate desire to see things we might claim to find disturbing? We are joined today by a writer who wonders at his own fascination (and inability to look away) with the darker side of life.

Transcript

Richard Aedy: When I was a young reporter one of the things we were taught about was the BBS. BBS stands for boring but significant. It’s often the lead story in a paper or news bulletin and it’s about tax or regulation or super or something that you really should be across. It’s very important but it’s often not that read. The stories you’re about to hear about are almost their complete opposite and that’s because first and foremost they’re not boring. They’re mostly not significant either. Not to you, although they can be. Essentially they’re stories of bad things happening to other people. And most of us Hoover them up. But why? Eric Wilson is author of Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why we can’t look away.

Eric Wilson: On a very basic level we as humans, when we watch violent events, be they fictional or non-fictional, get a physical rush. Our heart rate goes up, our body releases chemicals, we often feel as we might when we’re riding a roller coaster at an amusement park. Scientists have shown that all humans feel this regardless of what they might say—the thrill, the bodily thrill of seeing violence.

But I think over the top of this is a psychological reason. One psychologist in particular called Jung maintains that each of has within our psyche a shadow side. And that’s that part of ourselves that sort of contains everything that we fear and that we hate about ourselves. So we don’t want to face this so we repress this part of ourselves, Jung says, and it becomes our shadow. And it must find expression. In fact the more aggressively we repress the shadow the more it needs expression. So for Jung, this is the part of us that craves looking at violence, that craves looking at destruction, that craves looking at death. But there are other reasons as well. Morbid curiosity’s a very complex phenomenon. But those are two of the more prominent reasons that almost all of us, I would say all of us, indeed are drawn to the morbid whether we want to say so or not.

Richard Aedy: But it must encompass quite a range of things. Because if you think about it for a moment—I know you’ve thought about it a lot—if I watch a Funniest Home Videos which I have to say I don’t watch very often, but if I do, there’s always something where something terrible happens to somebody, I know it’s not going to kill them but I know it’s going to hurt and that is funny—that slipping on the banana skin thing. But also we’re just as interested in when celebrities make bad decisions or celebrities have problems of one sort or another, and it seems to me these things are different, because the first thing I can imagine happening to me and the second thing I can’t.

Eric Wilson: Exactly and what you hit upon is one of the more interesting manifestations of morbid curiosity. The word we use to describe taking pleasure in the misfortune of another is a German term, Schadenfreude, which means harm-joy in German—difficult to translate into English—but it captures that feeling we get when we watch YouTube and we watch people fall or people have accidents, we watch slapstick comedy. And we know really nothing’s at stake. No one’s really going to get hurt too badly and we get a kind of joy over this. But also I think there’s a deeper more complicated reason that we take interest in celebrity scandal. And that is in a world where we often feel isolated, in a world where we’re often confused, suddenly when there’s a terrible scandal we can as a society all kind of bond together and express our disdain toward a Charlie Sheen. And suddenly we feel as if we’re not alone. Suddenly we feel as if there is clarity between what’s good and what’s not good.

Richard Aedy: I want to ask you Eric about something, I suppose what I would think of as another category of this and that’s natural phenomena that can have human consequences. So floods and fires, most obviously and storms. I know that I can watch almost any amount of tornado footage for example. But surely this kind of morbid curiosity…now that makes evolutionary sense to me.

Eric Wilson: Well there’s another category of morbid curiosity. And what I’ll say is it’s a kind of aesthetic of the morbid curiosity. If we go back and read 18th and 19th century philosophers, many tried to make a distinction between the experience of the beautiful and the experience of the sublime. Experience of the beautiful would be say of a garden, a flower, a nice harmonious landscape. But experience of the sublime is standing face to face with nature in all of its grandeur, all of its power, all of its infinite force and boundless space—tornadoes, hurricanes. These are the kind of events that are sublime and according to some of these thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime…There’s two sayings, on the one hand it makes us feel small in an immensely powerful universe as if we’re somehow insignificant. But at the same time it makes us feel this is large and wonderful and marvellous as that very universe; we feel exhilarated. We feel as if we’re somehow one with the same power of that tornado. So I think this is one reason that we’re drawn to natural disaster, that we really sort of get exhilarated. We feel as if we’re somehow beyond ourselves.

Richard Aedy: All right. But something slightly different, well actually I would argue very different, is going on when we…when we hear stories or see images of one our deepest fears and that of course is being eaten by an animal. So like a shark or a bear or a lion. And yet when these stories abound—and they’re rare—but when they happen we are intensively interested in that.

Eric Wilson: Yes. Well I think part of that again is that we get real heart palpitations when we watch say a bear eating another person on a nature channel or a bear eating a gazelle or something. Our heart rate goes up, we release chemicals, it gives us kind of a rush. But I think there’s more going on. I think that’s what you’re suggesting as well. Part of watching a person say be eaten by a shark, it’s almost as if we’re sort of breaking a taboo. We know we shouldn’t watch that. We know we shouldn’t take pleasure in that. But in watching that and taking pleasure in that it’s like we’re doing something we shouldn’t do. We’re stealing the cookie we shouldn’t have. And that gives us an added rush. Sort of doing something perverse. Knowing it’s perverse. Feeling guilty about the perversity but at the same time getting a kind of sick thrill from it all at the same time.

Richard Aedy: For me the stakes are higher when a person deliberately hurts another person. I find that troubling. And part of the reason I find it troubling is that it’s difficult to not watch it.

Eric Wilson: Well you’ve sort of connected to…what you’re talking about would be a phenomenon that’s really taking over America—fight clubs where high school youths will film other youths fighting each other…

Richard Aedy: We’ve had a bit of that here too.

Eric Wilson: Yes.

Richard Aedy: And some of the kids are really young.

Eric Wilson: Yes. Yes. Exactly. Sometimes these people filming these fights will pay an older kid to go start fighting a younger kid for instance. And these films will be streamed on YouTube and some places sold illegally. I have to say in doing my research for this book I looked at some of this footage of the fight club and on the one hand I was disgusted. I thought oh this is…this is horrific, this is pure exploitation of human suffering for sick thrills. This is morbid curiosity at its absolute worst. But my gosh, let me click on another one. I couldn’t stop. And so there is this weird mixture of feeling really disappointed in myself but at the same time being unable not to take an interest in it. And that precisely gets at the paradox of morbid curiosity. I think that morbid curiosity can express what is worst in us and what is best in us, often at the very same time.

Richard Aedy: I want to ask you about something very big and important and especially in your country and that’s September 11, which I’m sure everybody remembers where they were when they heard about this. Because if you think of that and if you think of the footage of the planes slamming into the towers and then later the towers collapsing there was something strangely compelling about watching that. And some of the TV stations replayed it over and over again. And they knew what they were doing because people couldn’t stop themselves from watching it.

Eric Wilson: Yes. I really think this is the main reason I wrote this book was my own effort to try to understand why I myself could not stop watching that footage on September 11. I remember it very vividly and in fact I begin the book by talking about this. My wife was four months pregnant, suddenly a friend called, said turn on the TV...the attacks were there...and I could not stop watching that footage. I watched it all day, over and over and over again. And even when my wife said, don’t watch it anymore, I could not stop watching it. And I wanted to understand why that was. I felt terrified seeing those attacks. I felt guilty for being fixated on watching the footage of those attacks. What was going on there?

In thinking about suffering, yes we might be expressing that animalistic side of us that gets a cheap thrill from violence. But also we can express again a kind of a deep connection with life. Thinking about death teaches us what is most important in our own lives. Thinking about suffering teaches us what we need most in our lives to try to overcome suffering.